Let’s Talk About Your Speakeasy Bar!

Congratulations on becoming the newest franchisee in the Speakeasy Bar International™ family! In just a few short days, you'll receive a pod from S.B.I. Corporate Headquarters containing everything you might need to set up your top-secret cocktail bar.

Of course, as the owner of an S.B.I. franchise, you'll need to make sure that your customers enjoy the exact same experience they've come to expect from our seventeen thousand-plus Totally Unique™ locations all over the world. To that end, below you'll find a quick primer on Speakeasy Bar standard practices, as well as tips for maintaining your Black Suspenders™ (S.B.I. operating license).

ENTRANCES

Secret Doors

When customers enter your bar through a false bookcase, they'll feel like they're stepping into one of Al Capone's gin joints, or the man cave of a cheesy rich guy who watched a lot of "Scooby­Doo." Of course, the location of your "hidden" door will be tirelessly publicized, but forcing your customers to squeeze into a fake British phone booth and beg to get in is just kind of fun.

Passwords

Your average person feels like a huge dork using a password to get into a bar that is clearly open to the public, but average is not our demographic. Our clientele is made up of élite, savvy insiders, a.k.a. tourists from Houston who looked up the code word for this "illegal bar" on UrbanDaddy.com.

DRINKS

Ingredients

Legally, every Speakeasy cocktail must contain elderflower syrup, egg whites, and/or house-­made bitters. With that said, we encourage you to add up to eight other obscure, unpopular flavors to each drink, with the proviso that you generally add lots of sugar. We also suggest using hand­cracked ice, as the unique oils released from your mixologist's finger glands during this process make each drink truly one-of-a-kind.

Prices

Largely owing to price-­creep initiated by Speakeasy Bars all over the world, customers are now wearily accustomed to spending up to twelve dollars for a simple gin-and-tonic—even at a normal bar! Accordingly, every drink on your menu should eat up the better part of a twenty (basically, all of it, after tip). But feel free to charge more! Honestly, we're still trying to find the ceiling on this thing.

STAFF

_Facial Hair
_

As you know, a minimum of one bartender must have something resembling the pubic hair of a Siberian sled-dog captain dangling from his chin, and possibly into someone's Pisco Sour. Those on staff who cannot grow a big mangy beard are permitted to choose from a list of approved mustache styles ("leather daddy," "lion tamer," "Tampa pimp," and so on). The truly hairless can make up for their deficiency by doubling up on flair.

Flair

Flair is a matter of personal choice, but many of our current top performers choose to wear orphan hats, magician vests, miner's blouses, and Dust Bowl trousers. While full costumes are encouraged, there is no set "uniform"; only Japanese dragon tattoos are mandatory.

Service

Making a drink should never take more than twenty to thirty minutes. But, while efficiency is key, attitude and attention to detail matter more. At the end of the day, what's most important is that the customer gets the impression that his or her bartender is diffusing a bomb, curing cancer, or tuning a Stradivarius, rather than making a tiki drink with a flower sticking out of it.

AMBIANCE

Theme

Your theme options are endless, from "Prohibition classic" to "Prohibition bordello" to "prohibition opium den" (pick any one of those three). But whether our customers find us in Denver or Detroit or Dallas, they need to be transported back to another era, like Shanghai in the nineteen-twenties, or even just New York in 2007, when the first one of these goddamned places opened.

Décor

Inside your starter pack you'll find a phonograph, pressed-tin ceiling tiles, and a stuffed jackalope, but we encourage you to fill your bar with all manner of period and replica bric-a-brac. There's a reason Speakeasy Bars are known around the world as "the Applebee's of night life," and we intend to keep it that way.